Success factors for profitable dairy farming : a qualitative study on Gotland

Sammanfattning: The global dairy market is affecting the Swedish dairy business and the milk price is fluctuating for Swedish dairy farmers. The farmers in Sweden can do little to affect the milk price and instead their ability to manage costs at the farm determine their possibility to stay in business, and this ability varies among farmers. It is of interest to know how some farmers manage to stay profitable even when the milk price is low. This study used an interdisciplinary approach by combining animal science with insight from previous research in production economics and a social science research method to investigate which factors that differ between high profit dairy farms and farms with low profit. The inquiry was presented by LRF-konsult Gotland and the definition of profit was specified by LRF-konsult. The definition of profit for this study was; result before depreciation, which not includes depreciation and interest. The method for the study was a qualitative method using semi-structured interviews. The interview guide was based on factors important for profitability which was identified from previous literature. Factors used were: management capacity, strategy and decision making, heifer rearing and feeding. The definition for profit used by LRF-konsult was used for the selection of respondents and this was performed by LRF-konsult. The respondents were all at the time customers at LRF-konsult. The selection of farmers with high and low profit was based on data from the years of 2012 – 2015. A total of fourteen dairy farmers on Gotland were interviewed. They were divided into two groups with seven farmers in each group, one group consisted of farmers with high profit and was the group for analysis. The other group were the reference group consisting of farmers with low profit. The data was collected and analysed by a technique from grounded theory called coding where the data was broken down to smaller pieces called concepts. The data was analysed in three steps and then compared. The concepts were compared with the reference group and the concepts not identified in the reference group were used further. The concepts were formed into categories, and the categories were named success factors. Five success factors were identified; motivation to improve and to identify opportunities and challenges, attitude to economy and profitability linked to the practical daily operation, the importance of preventive work, choice of source for finding new information and the awareness of the roughage percentage in the feed ratio. It was possible to see a connection between the high profit group and the success factors, however, the cause and effect of this were discussed. It is difficult to draw conclusions from this rather small sample and therefore, the factors need to be further investigated to be valid as factors.